R shiny: display "loading..." message while function is running

I solved the problem by adding the following code to sidebarPanel():

HTML('<script type="text/javascript">
        $(document).ready(function() {
          $("#DownloadButton").click(function() {
            $("#Download").text("Loading...");
          });
        });
      </script>
')

I'm already using a simpler and more reliable way than the one I posted before.

A combination of

tags$style(type="text/css", "
           #loadmessage {
             position: fixed;
             top: 0px;
             left: 0px;
             width: 100%;
             padding: 5px 0px 5px 0px;
             text-align: center;
             font-weight: bold;
             font-size: 100%;
             color: #000000;
             background-color: #CCFF66;
             z-index: 105;
           }
  ")

with

conditionalPanel(condition="$('html').hasClass('shiny-busy')",
                 tags$div("Loading...",id="loadmessage")
)

Example:

runApp(list(
  ui = pageWithSidebar(
      headerPanel("Test"),
         sidebarPanel(
           tags$head(tags$style(type="text/css", "
             #loadmessage {
               position: fixed;
               top: 0px;
               left: 0px;
               width: 100%;
               padding: 5px 0px 5px 0px;
               text-align: center;
               font-weight: bold;
               font-size: 100%;
               color: #000000;
               background-color: #CCFF66;
               z-index: 105;
             }
          ")),
           numericInput('n', 'Number of obs', 100),
           conditionalPanel(condition="$('html').hasClass('shiny-busy')",
                            tags$div("Loading...",id="loadmessage"))
         ),
         mainPanel(plotOutput('plot'))
  ),
  server = function(input, output) {
    output$plot <- renderPlot({ Sys.sleep(2); hist(runif(input$n)) })
  }
))

tags$head() is not required, but it's a good practice to keep all the styles inside head tag.

Very simply, you can use built-in shiny functions showModal() at the start of the function and removeModal() at the end. If you remove the footer, said modal cannot be clicked out of.

Example:

observeEvent(input$button, {
     showModal(modalDialog("Doing a function", footer=NULL))
     #Do the stuff here....
     #...
     #...
     #Finish the function
     removeModal()
})